


The Mind is a Monkey

by scioscribe



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Fever, Gen, Guilt over past actions, Hurt/Comfort, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 03:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18865090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Okay,” Ward said.  “Great.  You have a telepathic fever.”





	The Mind is a Monkey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



Ward handled the money, which was contentious.

(“You don’t know how to haggle,” Danny said.

“I know how to haggle.  I choose not to bother because half the time we’re talking about a difference that comes down to the price of a SmartWater.  It’s a waste of time.  And why do you even care?  You don’t know the first thing about money.”

Danny refused to treat that as a serious complaint.  “I know that you have to negotiate a little at these independent places or people won’t respect you.  They’ll think you’re an idiot tourist.”

“Okay, why do I care what a random market stall guy in,” Ward checked his phone’s GPS, “the Huangshan Prefecture thinks of me?”

“People matter, Ward,” Danny said sincerely.  “You have to try to deal with them on their own terms.”

“When did you ever deal with me on my terms?”

“Yeah, well, your terms sucked.”  He patted Ward on the shoulder.  “Learn to haggle.”)

All the exquisitely expressed philosophical bullshit Danny passed onto him, and _your terms sucked_ was what Ward took as some kind of ad hoc Serenity Prayer, his own personal higher power being, well, literally anything it hadn’t been before.  Not Harold.  Not Rand.  Not oblivion.  So, fuck it.  He started haggling.  And it was weird.  It made every side-stop for roasted sweet potatoes or mutton skewers into a whole goddamn _conversation_ , let alone the dramas that ensued whenever they had to get something like a Jeep or, God forbid, a gun.  All of it required that he actually be _there_ and _engaged_.

Which was why he knew, down to the last _fen_ , the last tenth of a tenth of a _yuan_ , what they had paid for the piece of magical broken pottery that had apparently somehow given Danny a fever that had knocked him flat on his back.

Great.  Helpful.

They were deep in the countryside, miles from the nearest village, because of course they were.

“Don’t be too hard on it,” Danny said.  His voice was a croak.  “It’s not like we’d have Claire on-hand if we were in Beijing, either.  And you wouldn’t have gotten that kind of deal.”

“Yeah, I’d have been really pissed if I’d had to pay full price for you dying.  And if we were in Beijing, I could have her on a jet headed our way within an hour.”  He pressed his hand against his forehead, trying to think.  They had half a bottle of aspirin, a good supply of clean water, a couple towels, and a pallet with no pillow.  A shit-ton of mosquitos, all happy to ignore the bug spray and drink them dry.  The pottery shard, now glowing a dim alarm clock red.  No thermometer.  And—

He put his hand down and looked over at Danny.  Sweat-soaked Danny clenching his fists against the shivers that were wracking his body.

Ward said slowly, “I didn’t say anything about us being in the middle of nowhere.  Or about money.”

Danny frowned.  “Yeah, you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Look, I don’t want to argue with you right now, Ward,” Danny said, and now he sounded pissed.  “And yeah, we don’t have a thermometer.  I think I have enough sense of my body to tell when my temperature starts dropping.  And for all we know, this is normal for—”

“Okay,” Ward said.  “Great.  You have a telepathic fever.”

Danny stared at him.  “What?”

“What the hell did we buy?” Ward said.  He felt like some kind of oily black smoke was rolling through him.  Jesus, his head was a museum exhibition of things he didn’t want Danny to have to wade through.  Things he didn’t even want Danny to know.  He tried to concentrate on the pottery shard.  “You said it was, what, part of the bowl Lei Kung had you drink from before you faced down the dragon?”  He couldn’t believe his life had gotten to the point where he just said that kind of crap on a regular basis.

Danny’s teeth were chattering a little, but he clenched his jaw tight and spoke through it.  “Yeah.  A sacred ritual for—opening your mind—okay, I think I see what happened here.”

“Do you?  Do you see that?  Because I feel like _maybe_ you could have mentioned that this—”

“This didn’t happen before!” Danny said.  He forced himself up a little, propped up with one shaky arm.  “I think I just have some kind of overexposure to it or something, from carrying it around all day.  Before I only touched it right before I entered the cave.”

Ward wouldn’t have believed anyone else about that, not even Joy, but he believed Danny.  Danny wouldn’t set him up like this.  He wouldn’t trap him.

And Danny trusted him.  Which was idiotic.

Because his track record was that Joy had trusted him and he had lied to her for years and completely failed to protect her and Rand had trusted him and he’d siphoned off millions from the employee pension fund.  Not the best track record.  God, the person whose trust he’d most rewarded was _Harold_.  What had he said?  _I knew you’d come, you always do._

Ward crossed his arms across his chest, clamping his fingers tightly on his arms.  He had to focus.  What mattered right now was Danny.

Danny, who had probably just heard all of that.

Ward couldn’t look at him.  He said, “I’m going to get you some water,” and crossed to the other side of the room, where he dug a bottle of water out of their packs and tried not to have some kind of panic attack.

He brought the water back and unscrewed the cap.  He started to hand it over, but one look at Danny’s trembling hands told him that wouldn’t go well.

“Shove over a little.”  He didn’t know why he was bothering to say it out loud.  He guessed it felt better to draw some kind of line between actual requests and whatever his mind was blaring out at any given time.  _Remember how I had you committed?  Remember how I tried to have you killed?_ He eased down onto the mattress and put one arm behind Danny’s back, holding him up.  He tilted the bottle towards Danny’s mouth, steadying Danny’s own hand when Danny got a grip on the cup.

He’d done this for Harold when Harold was dying.  But towards the end, Harold had been down to ice chips and lemon swabs, not even water, so Ward had given him those instead.

 _You’ve got steady hands, son,_ Harold had said to him, late on one of those nights.  Ward had lived on that praise a long time.

“You do,” Danny said.  He was blinking a lot, but nothing he did could wash that feverish haze out of his eyes.  “Hands.”

But Ward didn’t want to think about it.  Every door tonight was just going to open up onto one more dark room he didn’t want aired out in Danny’s presence.  He already probably had to resign himself to this night being the end of the road for them.  There was no way Danny would want him around all the time after he’d been in Ward’s head.  Proof of concept: Ward also didn’t like being in his head.

Danny got a hold of his wrist.  It felt like a little more pressure would mean a broken bone, which was something he knew regrettably well, so Ward immediately stilled.  Danny loosened his hand at once.  “Sorry.  Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”  The last thing he wanted was Danny getting the nuts idea that Ward thought he was anything like Harold; you couldn’t find anybody less like Harold.  He looked for something to say and found only the weak, “That fist of yours is no joke even when it’s not amped up to glowstick-levels.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Danny said.

Yeah.  Because he was delirious and naïve and, at the moment, incapable of taking care of himself.

“Ward—”

“I am really going to need you to stop replying to stuff I haven’t said,” Ward said.  He tried to clip the words off precisely, like achieving that much control over the situation would at least be something.  “Do you want another drink?”

Danny looked at him.  He looked like he had all kinds of opinions about Ward’s thought processes and really, really wanted to share them.  But the headlong heroics thing had to take a backseat for once, apparently, because he could almost _see_ Danny slipping deeper into his fever.  The tremors up and down his body amped up and he groaned, easing out of Ward’s semi-hold to collapse back onto the mattress.

Ward felt like the world was unraveling around him.

Aspirin.  He needed to get Danny to take some aspirin even if it meant shoving it down his throat.

He got up and grabbed the bottle and came back with it, digging out two and then, after a second’s thought, three.  Pretty much the strategy he’d taken with his own painkillers back in the day: the more the merrier.  God, he wanted the softened edges right now that he’d get from being high.  He wanted to be a thousand miles above himself, totally not caring, and instead here he was, haggling with the goddamn universe to save Danny Rand.

He coaxed Danny through taking the aspirin and then tried to move away from him so he wouldn’t get Danny’s temperature up, but the second he did, Danny made some pleading sound that instantly turned the clock back _years_.

He’d done this before.  Not just for Harold and not just for Joy, either, the couple of times she’d been sick while he’d been her guardian.  He’d done this for _Danny_.

Badly, sure, that went without saying.  Danny was right, he’d been a dick of an older brother.  But still.

“I just remembered,” he said, settling back down on the mattress.  He still tried to keep as much of his body off Danny as possible to give him room to cool down, but Danny seemed okay as long as he had just one point of human contact.  “Remembered making you alphabet soup.  Getting you Popsicles.  But just grape, because you hated the grape ones and I was an asshole.  Am an asshole.”  He tentatively settled his hand on the back of Danny’s neck.  “You didn’t like being left alone then either.”

But he had left Danny alone, hadn’t he?  Probably.  He didn’t remember, but it seemed like what he would have done.  Actually pretty low on the scale of shitty behavior relative to his entire life, really.

He figured Danny had probably gotten left alone a lot at K’un-Lun.  Maybe he’d had Davos.

“I’m not leaving now,” Ward said.  It seemed to be right combination of words, because Danny’s muscles eased minutely under his hand, some of the tension ebbing out.

And now he was stuck glued to Danny’s side with Danny seeing every thought that flickered through his brain.  Terrific.  His actual best chance of getting out of this with his dignity intact was Danny getting so delirious that he just forgot all this—and great, now Danny knew that Ward was sitting around favorably speculating on him practically winding up with brain damage.  At least he was keeping the mosquitoes off him.

“Okay,” he said out loud.  “What we’re going to do is just get you through tonight.  I’m going to keep giving you water and aspirin until your fever breaks.”  Unless it didn’t.  He overruled that.  “And then I’m going to go lock that pottery shard in something airtight until we can figure out what to do with it.  And for the record, of all the things I do appreciate about you, you dragging me into a life where I have to plan safe magic pottery disposal like I’m in an _Indiana Jones_ movie is not one of them.”

“Yeah, but if it could melt Nazis,” Danny mumbled, “that would be cool.”

“I’m not going to test that out.  I don’t want a bunch of mind-reading Nazis running around if it goes wrong, and neither do you.  And no mind-reading ninjas, either.”

He had a little hope there that the aspirin was making a quick difference if Danny was back to talking, but apparently not, because they went exactly nowhere from there.  Danny just made a snuffling noise and turned over on his side.  Maybe the best possible option was him getting some sleep.  The best medicine, right?  Aside from actual medicine.

Rand-patented and sold at cost.

He looked down at Danny’s messy hair, darker with sweat, and said, “I’m just going to say it because you’re going to hear it anyway: I still think slashing our drug price down that far was a colossally bad business decision.  I guess neither one of us is really in the business anymore, though, so—let it be on their heads.”  He could have used some sleep himself.  He was starting to feel a little punchy.  But he couldn’t stand the thought of drifting off and then waking up again and finding Danny— _gone._   He’d splash some water on his face or something.

Still, no matter how he tried to stay awake, he had the feeling that he was dozing off a little, losing chunks of time.  It didn’t help that he was trying hard to keep his mind as blank as possible.

Then Danny started thrashing around and Ward snapped up—woke up?  He wasn’t sure—from some grainy, half-conscious state that was probably, ironically, the closest he’d ever gotten to meditation.

Yeah, he’d definitely slept.  It was fully dark now.  Shit.  Time to give Danny some more aspirin.  He ran through all that on autopilot while he concentrated on waking Danny up.

“Danny, Danny.  Hey, come on.  It’s okay, you’re all right.”  It wasn’t, and he wasn’t, but Ward didn’t know what else to say.  “I’m here, okay?”

He thought he saw a glimmer: Danny opening his eyes a crack.  “Ward?”

“Yeah.  Right here.”  He grabbed Danny’s hand.  “See?”

“But you were hurt,” Danny said.  “You—Harold—”  He didn’t sound much more coherent than before, but he _definitely_ sounded more awake.  Ward could have just been seeing things, but he would have sworn there was a frenetic trace of gold flickering around the veins in Danny’s hand, the one he was holding.  Then again, he was pretty out of it, too.

“You were dreaming,” Ward said.

“You were trapped.  He hurt you.”

Comprehension—even half-assed, dim comprehension—dawned way too late.  Shit.  He had _definitely_ fallen asleep, and _he’d_ dreamed, and he’d given his dream to Danny.  Contaminated him with it, like it was a cold.

“It was just a dream, Danny.”

“Why would I dream about that?”

“You weren’t.  I was.”  He didn’t really remember, but he’d had that dream before.  An awful ache in his back, him trying to stop himself from falling to his knees, from _losing_ it, and the ground being like tar, holding him in place.  Only he’d never needed the tar to stick him there, had he?  He had just come back over and over again.  There was no way he needed to infect Danny with any of that.  “You’re picking up on what’s in my head, remember?  Don’t worry about it.”

“Did that really happen?”

“No,” Ward said.

“You’re seriously trying to lie to me when you know I can read your mind?”

“I was one hundred percent never stuck in tar in Harold’s penthouse, I promise you that.  Go back to sleep and I’ll—stay awake and think about… I don’t know.  Bunnies.  Green tea.  Whatever floats your boat.”

“I would never, ever have let that happen to you,” Danny said.  There was another flicker of light.  “If I’d known—”

Ward said, “You’re glowing.”  Enough to light up Danny’s face now.  He could see the angry earnestness of it and had no idea what to do with that existing on his behalf; he cordoned it off to be dealt with later.  “That’s, what?  Your chi coming back?”

Danny looked down at his hand.  “Huh.”  He flexed his fingers.  The glow stabilized.  “I always had my chi.  Everyone has their own energy—”

“Please don’t do this to me right now,” Ward said.  “I’m begging you.”

Danny relented.  “Yeah, it’s ‘my chi coming back.’”

“Air-quotes really don’t work for you,” Ward said.  “This—you can heal yourself with this, right?  Can you get rid of the fever?”

“I think so,” Danny said cautiously.  He met Ward’s eyes.  “I don’t think I can shake the telepathy off at the same time, though.  That’s not sickness, that’s—”

“Who cares about the telepathy?  _Get rid of the fever_.”

Danny closed his eyes.  The light in his hand radiated up, tracing its way through his body.  Ward watched—awed a little despite himself—as Danny’s shivers slowly disappeared.  Ward was still holding his other hand and he’d swear he could feel Danny’s temperature dropping.  He’d seen Danny do the impossible before, but he’d never been more grateful than he was right now.

Danny exhaled.  The glow dimmed out again.  “I think that’s it.  The fever was just, you know, a side-effect.  The brain probably doesn’t deal well with having magical changes forced on it.”

“No kidding.”

“But I’ve got a handle on it now.  I think it’ll pass in a couple of days, probably by the time we get down the mountain.  Ward—”

Ward cut him off.  “If you’re really okay, I’m going to bed.”  He stretched out on the pallet and turned on his side, putting his back to Danny.  Sure, that would persuade Captain Telepathy over there that he’d really fallen asleep.

A couple more days of him broadcasting everything he didn’t want Danny to know or think about.

He was like—why not try on an overwrought metaphor?  What the hell, right?  He had an audience to impress, didn’t he?  He was like their Staten Island plant, or at least the way the allegations had painted it.  Everything peachy on the surface, passing every inspection, but always leaking out poison.  Ruining people’s lives.  Coming up with bullshit analogies.  He pressed his fingers to his forehead.

_I had you committed.  I tried to have you killed.  I tried to shut you out of your fair share of the company.  I made you think you were responsible for Harold’s death.  And I treated you like shit when we were kids._

Danny settled a hand between Ward’s shoulders.  “Bunnies,” he said quietly.  “Green tea.  I—I don’t know what you like, really.  What do you like?”

Heroin.  Painkillers.  Booze.  Winning.

Freedom.  Joy.  Danny.

“I’m right here,” Danny said.  His tone brightened.  “And I have an idea.”  He slid past Ward and went over to rummage through their packs until he came up with that ancient iPod of his.  He came back.  Hooked the earbuds into Ward’s ears.  In another second, Mystikal was pumping through Ward’s head, drowning out everything.

Except Danny’s voice, just above him:

“You stayed, you know.  Maybe not when I was a kid, sure, but tonight.  You were great.  All you wanted was for me to get better.  And you didn’t give me any grape Popsicles, so, yeah, huge improvement as a brother.”

“Danny.”  He rolled over and Danny’s grip slid to his shoulder instead.  Constant.  “I can’t have a serious conversation with you with ‘Shake Ya Ass’ on in the background.”

He could just make out the soft chuff of Danny’s laugh.  “Fair enough.”  He lay down too and, looking up at the dark ceiling, said, “I don’t need to know what you’re thinking, Ward.  I already know the important stuff.”

Ward swallowed down whatever tangle was in his throat.  Yeah, he thought vaguely, he’d gotten a good deal.  On his own, newer terms.  “Good night, Danny.”

“I’ll try to dream my own dreams,” Danny said.

Ward closed his eyes.  “You can borrow mine if it’s a good one.  I’ve had a few more of those lately.”

“Me too.”  Danny shooed a mosquito away.  “We must be getting luckier,” he added, ignoring the fact that the mosquitoes alone meant their luck still had a sense of humor, ignoring Ward’s skepticism of that idea.  Skepticism probably being, in Danny Rand Land, something that wasn’t important.  Not as long as you stayed.  And Ward knew he wasn’t going anywhere.


End file.
